The many hands--and connections --that go into overnight delivery

Information about the package is as important as the package itself." I said that in 1978, five years after FedEx
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) created the modern express industry. Please don't misunderstand me. We care a lot about what's inside the box, but the ability to track and trace shipments and thereby manage inventory in motion revolutionized logistics. Of course, back then I couldn't have imagined what we'd be witnessing today: the vast and steady integration of the world's economy into one giant interdependent global network.

Global integration is not a new phenomenon. It happened in the Roman era, over a network of roads; it happened during the Renaissance, when trading and merchant companies crisscrossed oceans; and it happened in the 19th century, with help from railroads and telegraphs. But today it's happening faster than ever before and it means the dispersion of products and services of the widest breadth imaginable to every corner of the world.

We can now get our computer problems solved in minutes by a phone rep in India or get a same-day medical consultation by doctors in Tokyo, London and New York. And we can ship high-tech and high-value-added goods within one to two business days, door-to-door, virtually anywhere on the planet.

We couldn't do any of this without complex information networks. FedEx spends roughly $1.5 billion a year on information technology. Some rough numbers will give you an idea of why. Every second of every day we have to handle 3,000 transactions, as well as 1,000 inquiries on the status of a package. Orders go out to 70,000 handheld devices carried by our couriers and contractors and millions of our customers' desktops. Every day FedEx handles 6 million shipments around the globe. We have close to 7,000 people in IT overseeing what Rob Carter, our chief information officer, understatedly calls "an intense computing environment."

Our networks link 275,000 team members and help operate 677 aircraft and 70,000-plus trucks worldwide. These systems have recently helped deliver some unusual shipments:

Penguins and sea otters back to their aquarium in New Orleans almost a year after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their home.

40 tons of valuable artifacts from the doomed ocean liner R.M.S. Titanic, which were marooned at customs in Athens, Greece, to Atlanta, in time for an important exhibition.

However, the complexity of our job is best illustrated in a deceptively simple task: sending flowers to your mom for Mother's Day. Talk about something that absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. Let's follow that order along the physical network of roads, airports and fiber-optic cables, as well as the economic networks of business partners and social networks on the Web.

You're in New York City, and your mom lives in Phoenix. You go online to place an order for two dozen roses from, say, ProFlowers.com. (The company is headquartered in San Diego, but its roses may come from Rio de Janeiro and arrive, with precustoms clearance, in Miami.) ProFlowers generates a shipping label and notifies FedEx Express, which assigns the order a tracking number and dispatches a courier who scans that number, triggering a notification event to the FedEx and ProFlowers networks and to the customer that the roses have been picked up in ProFlowers' distribution center. Once in FedEx's hands the flowers will be worked into our network and will head to our World Hub in Memphis--which accommodates 400 flights and 1.5 million-plus packages every day; more than 15,000 employees can sort up to 500,000 packages an hour.

Your mom's roses have a distinct bar code that signals they're headed for Phoenix. At the Hub the flowers are scanned and sorted so they can make their final destination. After a cross-country journey, the flowers arrive in Phoenix. By the time they reach your mom the roses will have been scanned at least 14 times, so that you can track the flowers as they move through our system. The roses are delivered by a FedEx courier and, depending on which service you choose, the entire transaction--from online order to signed box of flowers--can take as little as 24 hours.

As revolutionary as it was to provide customers the visibility to track packages online, which we introduced in 1994, customers now expect such service. But a pilot initiative we're working on will soon let you see the progress on a real-time basis, with the aid of tools like Google
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) Maps. Packages will become "smarter." That is, they'll be able to communicate to FedEx if their environments become too hot or too cold, or if light has penetrated the package, indicating a possible security breach. FedEx SmartPackage, or active sensor technology, has the ability to dynamically locate, track and provide information about shipments.

This networked world makes for interesting times. At FedEx our ultimate product is access. It's always been that way, since people first began trading with each other. Except today the network of commerce is virtually everyone, everywhere--right now.

Frederick W. Smith is chairman, president and chief executive of FedEx.